Thinkers Timeline

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was a Mozambican anthropologist and revolutionary who founded FRELIMO, the movement that led Mozambique's independence struggle against Portugal. He was born in 1920 in N'wajahani, in the Gaza province of southern Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. He was the fourth of sixteen sons of a Tsonga chief. The colonial school system was almost only for Europeans, but Mondlane gained entry through Swiss Presbyterian mission schools. He worked as a shepherd as a boy. Education in his country was almost impossible; he had to leave to get any. His academic journey was extraordinary. He studied in South Africa at Witwatersrand University, but was expelled in 1949 for opposing the new apartheid regime. He went briefly to Lisbon, then to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, then to Northwestern University in Illinois, where he earned a PhD in sociology in 1960. He worked at the United Nations from 1957, then taught anthropology at Syracuse University in the early 1960s. He married Janet Johnson, a white American woman from Indiana. In 1962 he left academic life. He went to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to help unite three Mozambican exile groups into a single movement. The result was FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique. He became its first president. Under his leadership FRELIMO began the armed struggle against Portuguese rule in 1964. He wrote his book The Struggle for Mozambique while leading the war. On 3 February 1969, in Dar es Salaam, he opened a parcel addressed to him. It contained a bomb. He was killed instantly. The Portuguese secret police, PIDE, is widely believed to have been responsible. He was 48. Mozambique gained independence six years later, in 1975.